All things freshwater: news, analysis, humor, reviews, and commentary from Michael E. 'Aquadoc' Campana, hydrogeologist, hydrophilanthropist, Professor of Hydrogeology and Water Resources Management in the Geography Program of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS) at Oregon State University and Emeritus Professor of Hydrogeology at the University of New Mexico. He is Past President of the American Water Resources Association (AWRA), Past Chair of the Scientists & Engineers Division of the National Ground Water Association (NGWA), Past President of the nonprofit NGWA Foundation and President and Founder the nonprofit Ann Campana Judge Foundation, an organization involved with WaSH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) in Central America. He serves on the Steering Committee of the Global Water Partnership (GWP). CYA statement: with the exception of guest posts, the opinions expressed herein are solely those of Michael E. Campana and not those of CEOAS, Oregon State University, ACJF, AWRA, NGWA, GWP, my spouse Mary Frances, or any other person or organization.

Texas Agriculture Law BlogDon't let the name fool you - there are lots of water issues in agriculture and Tiffany Dowell of Texas A&M University does a fabulous job with this important Internet resource. Give it a read - I do every day!

The Way of WaterDr. Jennifer Veilleux records her fieldwork, research, and thoughts about water resources development and management, indigenous rights, ethics, and a host of other issues.

Thirsty in SuburbiaGayle Leonard documents things from the world of water that make us smile: particularly funny, amusing and weird items on bottled water, water towers, water marketing, recycling, the art-water nexus and working.

This Day in Water HistoryMichael J. 'Mike' McGuire, engineer extraordinaire, NAE member, and author of 'The Chlorine Revolution', blogs about historical happenings in the fields of drinking water and wastewater keyed to calendar dates.

Watershed Moments: Thoughts from the HydrosphereFrom Sarah Boon - rediscovering her writing and editing roots after 13 years, primarily as an environmental scientist. Her writing centres around creative non-fiction, specifically memoir and nature writing. The landscapes of western Canada are her main inspiration.

WaterWiredAll things freshwater: news, comment, publications and analysis from hydrogeologist Michael E. Campana, Professor at Oregon State University and Technical Director of the AWRA.

7 posts from April 5, 2020 - April 11, 2020

Saturday, 11 April 2020

The other day I was listening to NPR and heard a story about some folks in Idaho (including Ammon Bundy, who announced an Easter gathering of hundreds of his followers) who were upset about their rights being violated by all this fuss over the pandemic. I don't recall that a suit had been filed but I may be wrong about that.

In any case, the story reminded me of the following piece that V.P. Price wrote on 30 March 2020 in the Mercury Messenger.He had given me permission to publish it.

The Age of Anxiety: Personal Liberty v. Public Health

You knew it was going to happen. Someone was going to claim in court that current public health restraints on behavior are denying him his constitutional rights to assemble, worship and do business as he pleases as a free American.

Such a suit has been filed in U.S. District Court by the president of the Albuquerque Tea Party against New Mexico’s “shelter in place” and “social distancing” directives, according to KOB news last week. The suit struck a blow for social irresponsibility and profit over the rule of safety, precaution and the public good. The suit reflects, I’m sure, an underlying attitude of many who resent government and refuse to comply with public health measures and advice on how to slow the spread of coronavirus in the United States, now the country with the worst outbreak of this pandemic anywhere in the world.

As if the spread of this unpredictable, often lethal virus weren’t traumatic enough, the local Tea Party has added a new element of anxiety to the situation. When they actively advocate disregarding public health directives, those of us who are particularly vulnerable to the fatal aspects of the disease, which essentially can suffocate its victims, feel more pressure than ever to stay at home and disengage.

Ours is, indeed, an Age of Anxiety, to quote the British-American poet W.H. Auden, who published his long poem of the same name in1947. His poem describes the emotional and philosophical reality of a historical era that started more than 90 years ago with the Great Depression and continues right to this very moment in Donald Trump’s America – a modern catastrophe that Auden, of course, knows nothing about, having died in 1973.

During those years, we have confronted anxiously one question presented in many guises. Will leaders around the world exercise humanitarian restraint and a devotion to the public good, or will they pursue power, privilege and profit with unbridled willfulness?

The Age of Anxiety now adds the coronavirus pandemic to the litany of traumas and horrors we’ve had to live with, including the Bomb and the on-going threat of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the existence of rogue nuclear states, the constant threat of anti-Semitism and Jim Crow violence, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, the health menace of smoking tobacco, the still horrifying cancer epidemic, corporate environmental pollution threatening public health (more a danger now than ever with Trump dismantling of the EPA), the pesticide plague, terrorism of all kinds, the dire warnings about climate change and the coming ubiquity of pandemics and mass extinctions, the profound never-ending crises of misogyny and racism, the inflaming of xenophobia, gay bashing and now this pandemic and those who write off public health directives as a government intrusion on private life and business.

Ours is surely an Age of Anxiety.

Fear and apprehension permeate every layer of our society and are reinforced by panic-mongering advertising that drives our consumer economy and makes the health and wellness industry, including pharmaceuticals, a dominant player in our financial lives, so much so that being without health insurance is seen by many as tantamount to a death sentence, which is why Medicare and Medicaid are such genuine godsends to the elderly and impoverished.

How does one keep one’s sense of reality in times like these? How does one keep a humane perspective and stay not only free of this truly nasty, painful and sometimes fatal virus but also of the fear of it? Equally important, how does one best exercise restraint and keep from infecting others with this stealth virus that often has no outward symptoms, but is still lethal to those who are vulnerable to its predations?

The coronavirus pandemic turns out to be a defining moment in our sense of public-spirited responsibility and precaution. To whom are we responsible if not to our families, neighbors, friends and the people who make a living serving our needs?

We seem to be moving, very anxiously right now, to an open conflict between public health common sense (such as in social distancing and the banning of even relatively small congregations of people while this pandemic is raging) and the personal liberty to do as we please and go about our own business as we see fit, no matter what. This clash between staying healthy and making money has to be as fundamental a conflict as any in our anxious age, which so often pits public health science against politics of profit growth. And we are now seeing how frail all mighty science is when facing a mob mentality motivated by greed rather than conscience.

That’s the moral crux of this moment in the Age of Anxiety. What percentage of us can live with the thought of infecting and potentially killing someone else while exercising our “right” to make a living by doing as we please though endangering others?

The central moral tenant of a free society is that you are free to do as you like as long as doing what you like doesn’t impinge on the freedom and well-being of others.

The grounding question, then, that we must all ask ourselves is this: “Is exercising my financial and personal freedoms worth potentially causing someone else to suffer an agonizing death?”

At some point, perhaps not precisely now, the fate of humankind could well depend on how the majority of us answer such a question.

Friday, 10 April 2020

Do you know a water/climate change maker? Why not nominate her/him for a Global Water Partnership ChangeMaker Award? Make Smart Water Decisions Visible! Applications due 7 June 2020. Click here.

Enjoy!

The links below represent the week's water news as represented by my Tweets. I do not pretend that this survey is a comprehensive survey of the water news; it's my attempt to keep my readers informed to the best of my ability and available time.

Scroll down to 'Positions Open' and 'Previous Weeks' Positions Open' to see the jobs. All my individual job Tweets are archived at #JobWaWi. Previous weekly summaries are archived at: #WaWiNews or click here.

It's @NatureBriefing-9 April 2020. Coming to grips with current state of #coronavirus vaccine development, welcome an engineered enzyme that dissolves one of the world’s most commonly used plastics, enjoy giant dinosaur footprints on the roof of a cave https://bit.ly/2VeS7t7

It's @natureBriefing 8 April 2020. Today we enjoy spectacular images of a quasar, explore how mass testing can keep a lid on #COVID19 and discover new bridges between apparently distant continents in the mathematical landscape. https://bit.ly/39VD0tQ

It's @natureBriefing - 7 April 2020. Canada is beginning the world’s largest clinical trial of survivors’ blood to treat #COVID19, examine the shaky evidence for the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and celebrate the life of astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge https://tinyurl.com/rtpkloc

It's @natureBriefing - 6 April 2020. Why Germany’s #coronavirus death rate is so low, take a journey through the virus’s full genome and the proteins it encodes, and hark back to the polio epidemic that led to the creation of intensive care as we know it.https://bit.ly/2JLa7G8

Conferences,Webinars, Workshops and Calls for Abstracts/PaperSave the date! @iwra_waterOnline conference on 'Addressing Groundwater Resilience under Climate Change', 28-29 October 2020. Check http://iwra.org for more information.

Education, Events, and OpportunitiesInterested in any facet of Western USA water? Apply for the Women in Water $5,000 Scholarship (AY 2020-21) between 1 April and 1 July 2020. Details: https://bit.ly/3e6o3IK

It's @NatureBriefing-9 April 2020. Coming to grips with current state of #coronavirus vaccine development, welcome an engineered enzyme that dissolves one of the world’s most commonly used plastics, enjoy giant dinosaur footprints on the roof of a cave https://bit.ly/2VeS7t7

It's @natureBriefing 8 April 2020. Today we enjoy spectacular images of a quasar, explore how mass testing can keep a lid on #COVID19 and discover new bridges between apparently distant continents in the mathematical landscape. https://bit.ly/39VD0tQ

It's @natureBriefing - 7 April 2020. Canada is beginning the world’s largest clinical trial of survivors’ blood to treat #COVID19, examine the shaky evidence for the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and celebrate the life of astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge https://tinyurl.com/rtpkloc

It's @natureBriefing - 6 April 2020. Why Germany’s #coronavirus death rate is so low, take a journey through the virus’s full genome and the proteins it encodes, and hark back to the polio epidemic that led to the creation of intensive care as we know it.https://bit.ly/2JLa7G8

Personal, People, Interviews, and Quotes"Water crises are largely governance crises." - World Water Assessment Program (2006)

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders the sea searching for a suitable rock or coral to cling to and make its home for life. This task requires a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds home it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure." - Unknown

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders the sea searching for a suitable rock or coral to cling to and make its home for life. This task requires a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds home it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure." - Unknown

Here are the first few sections. The graphics are from the article but are inserted just for informational purposes and don't correspond to the verbiage shown here.

Introduction

The Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 (also known as the Farm Bill) gives water utilities the opportunity to build mutually beneficial relationships with agricultural producers in their watersheds. The Farm Bill provides guaranteed funding for source water protection (SWP) projects and requires the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to consult with utilities to identify SWP areas (Mehan & Carpenter 2019). SWP proactively reduces pollutant and sediment flows into watersheds, moderating pressures on utilities and providing recreational, economic, and public health benefits to adjacent communities.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) administers SWP financial assistance through NRCS, the Farm Service Agency, and the US Forest Service (USFS), with activities spanning several types of projects. This article explores the expanded SWP provisions of the 2018 Farm Bill and past applications of SWP in the NRCS assistance programs.

SWP: Significance and History

The health consequences associated with nutrient and sediment runoff pose serious threats to drinking water utilities and their customers. Overabundant nutrient runoff can lead to harmful algal blooms that require public health advisories and additional water treatment and monitoring. For example, algal blooms polluted the Detroit Lake reservoir—the drinking water supply of Salem, Ore.—with cyanotoxins, leading to two drinking water advisories in summer 2018.

When there are risks, utilities should have plans for cyanotoxin outbreaks, but they can also preemptively mitigate potential contamination problems. In particular, agricultural SWP projects allow utilities to work with producers to minimize pollutant flows and limit nutrient overloads. The Farm Bill’s statutory requirement to protect source water also includes actions to ensure that healthy watersheds remain healthy.

SWP is a proactive approach to safeguard, maintain, or improve the quality and/or quantity of drinking water sources and their contributing areas. To address nonpoint sources, which make up 85% of all water pollution in the United States (Ruckelshaus 2010), SWP plans can include variable treatments such as buffers, cover crops, water management, and nutrient management (including manure).

The USDA maintains technical and financial support for conservation initiatives, including SWP through NRCS, and it works with private landowners, farmers, and ranchers to implement environmentally beneficial projects. State technical committees and local working groups make program and policy recommendations to prioritize projects on the basis of size, scope, and required resources.

Within NRCS, 14 individual assistance programs respond to natural resource conservation concerns. In the 2018 Farm Bill, funding for SWP was included and statutorily set at a minimum of 10% of all conservation funds administered by NRCS—the first such provision in Farm Bill history. These programs require highly motivated partners to help implement SWP in priority watersheds. Water utilities can interact directly as participants and informally as informational sources supporting SWP practices.

With great portions of the global economy put on hold because of COVID-19, with millions of us around the world sick or dead and trillions of dollars lost in the stock market, with joblessness soaring and hardworking people living on the margins and facing dire times because their work has been swept away, when will hard-nosed business people, and their political followers of both persuasions, finally get real about trying to lessen the threat of virus-stimulating climate change?

Or do we actually have to come to the brink of destroying ourselves to do something meaningful about the earth’s hothouse atmosphere, the perfect spawning ground for family-decimating illness, and the human tragedy of communities of small businesses laying in ruins? When will we finally stop being fools!?

COVID-19 will probably become, someday, just another background virus that unlucky or foolish persons will catch and likely recover from, just like any other virus. But that someday, it seems clear now, may be a long way away for working people — a year, perhaps18 months, or more.

What is to be done? And where is the new leadership that will help take us out of this terrible bind? Where, for instance, are Joe and Bernie? Have they gone fishing? Who’s filling the void? Democratic governors are, like New Mexico’s, New York’s, California’s and Michigan’s. Is a coronavirus sweeping away the stalemate in the Democratic Party and showing the world what troglodytes the Republicans have become? It may well be. And the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act doesn’t hurt. But how will the largest disaster and economic relief package ever signed into law in this country really help? How long will it take to trickle down to real people and how will it be administered by Republicans who hate government and generally consider helping people in trouble to be disincentive to their own self-help? We won’t hear about the real impact for a long time, I think, if ever.

The crisis we’re facing is a four-fold complication.

First, it’s a public health crisis that could sicken and kill, in the long run, a multitude of us, rich and poor. One estimate has potentially 70 percent of us getting infected. And those of us with asthma, smoking-related lung disorders, cancer, diabetes, bad hearts and any number of other ailments, young and old, are truly in a dangerously precarious place. Most human habitats in the world, even those with farseeing leadership, are poorly equipped to deal with such a deluge of death and illness.

Second, it’s an environmental crisis. Climate change unsettles basic living conditions in such a way that all living things have to make adjustments, and successful evolutionary responses in one species can play havoc with the lives of species around it. Viruses, tiny packets of protein, mutate constantly. It’s their evolutionary “genius,” if you will, to adapt — and adapt faster than one could imagine. But as Bill Gates has pointed out, COVID-19 has stimulated the global scientific community to cooperate more than ever to put an end to this pandemic. He told a TED interviewer, “the amount of innovation, the way we can connect up and work together, yes, I’m super positive about that….We will get out of this, and then we will get ready for the next epidemic.” So maybe human adaptability has a chance of keeping up.

Third, it’s an economic crisis. As of last week, 7 million Americans had filed for unemployment insurance since the outbreak ramped up in the U.S. I’m sure it will be many more this week. I think of all my friends in all the shuttered locally-owned cafes and stores around the city now caught in an economic whirlpool gulping them down, some of them forever. What about the suddenly jobless, responsible and diligent people we know and care for at Garcia’s, the Range, Flying Star, Le Chantilly, Los Poblanos, Café Azul and scores of other places of business? What will become of them, if they are forced to stay away even another month, much less two or three, before they can start earning a paycheck again? Who has an economic recovery plan for everyday workers, not just big corporations?

The CARES Act is designed for emergency relief, not long-term recovery. How can we avoid a virtually complete economic shutdown in the future? And how are we going to economically compensate, as a society, all those health care workers who’ve put their lives on the line every day during this crisis? Who is thinking about restarting the economy in a more equitable way than it existed before?

Fourth, it’s a political crisis. The Repulican party, in its last gasp extremist phase, is utterly useless in this situation, comically so, if this weren’t all so deadly serious. The big Democrats, Joe and Bernie, have been like the Invisible Man in the movies. What are they thinking about? What plans for recovery are they cooking up? What more do they think can we do to limit the damage in lives and livelihoods caused by this virus? The big Democrats are virtually useless too, so far. Is this true for the Democratic party as whole? I don’t think so. Most of those with the grace of leadership talent are governing the states, working themselves and their state governments with hyper-serious intent. They’re getting no help whatsoever from Trump Washington, so they probably don’t have time to think very far ahead.

But somebody in government must start thinking about COVID-19, and future pandemics, holistically as a public health crisis with cascading economic and political consequences unthought of by most of us even two months ago. Now is the time for new leaders with new ideas to rise to the surface. We need big thinkers. The Republicans are so small-minded, so cemented in their prejudices, that it’s not hyperbole to say that it seems like only Democrats have a chance to muster up the mental agility that produces the kinds of thinkers we need.

But will the Democratic Party succeed? Can Joe and Bernie make massive leaps in mental acuity and do the kind of adaptive thinking that will get us out of this four-way bind? Lots of us are listening, but we haven’t heard a thing.

The world ahead will not be the same as the world we’ve left behind — except, tragically, for climate change. And if we don’t stop being idiots about global warming soon, we could well see not only the appearance of waves of new pandemics but also of tyrants riding high on their white horses and promising to save the day with the snap of their fingers.

Enjoy!

"It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country." - Will Durant (thanks to Bill Alley)

Tuesday, 07 April 2020

I’ve only seen a slight uptick in jobs advertised as remote, but here is the link for all jobs on the website that are remote in nature. Most are consultancies, but we’ll see how this changes in the future, but just so you have it.

And, please send open positions my way to post (it’s free). Some of our colleagues will be losing jobs and a graduating class is coming on the job market, so the more openings the better.

Stay healthy!

Note: AWRA has created an online COVID19 and coronavirus online reporistory Check it out here.

Circle of BlueCircle of Blue uses journalism, scientific research, and conversations from around the world to bring the story of the global freshwater crisis to life. Here you’ll find new water reports, news headlines, and hear from leading scientists.

Drink Water For LifeThe idea is simple. Drink water or other cheap beverages instead of expensive lattes, sodas, and bottled water for a set period of time. A day, a week, a month, Lent, Ramadan, Passover, or some other holiday period.

eFlowNet NewsletterFrom the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) this newsletter has lots of information about environmental flows and related issues.

Sustainable Water Resources RoundtableSince 2002, the Sustainable Water Resources Roundtable (SWRR) has brought together federal, state, corporate, non-profit and academic sectors to advance our understanding of the nation’s water resources and to develop tools for their sustainable management.